Finnley stared up at the night sky, running over algorithms in her head. It always made her calm when she was stressed.
Finnley had been thinking of algorithms a lot lately.
Was it Finnley's fault that she was meant to be hacking computers instead of doing schoolwork? No! It was her parents and her brother's fault.
Half the time, she hacked to make their lives better, and they didn't even know it.
Finnley intended to keep it that way.
A window behind her opened, and Finnley craned her neck to see who it was. Her twin brother, Nick, was climbing out onto the roof, looking a bit satisfied with himself.
"It seems a little too nice for a geek like you to be out," he said, sitting Indian-style next to her.
"Hey, I can only change your grades so many times before I need to clear my conscience," Finnley responded, throwing him a triumphant smile. She had won this round.
School wasn't even in session yet, and Nick had already told Finnley his whole schedule so she could get a head start on hacking his teacher's accounts. Nick was smart and all, but he lacked work ethic. He needed to cheat so their parents wouldn't kill him.
He also cheated to get closer to Finnley, but she didn't know that.
"How was your day?" Finnley asked.
"Fine," he replied. "Today was just fine."
By the look on his face, Finnley bet that he was more than fine.
She looked back at the sky, closing her eyes and thinking of algorithms. She could feel herself getting calmer with each equation, and after a minute, she looked back at Nick.
"What does 'fine' mean?" Finnley asked. Nick turned his head to her at the question.
"Fine means amazing, in this case," Nick responded, his smile growing.
"Tell me," Finnley said, being the pushy twin sister she always was. "Why was today so amazing?"
Nick waited a moment before responding. "Well, there's this girl. She just moved back here after leaving for a bit. And I totally scored with her!"
"'Scored'?" Finnley smirked. "How so?"
"I got her number, and we're going out this weekend."
So, her brother was more of a gentleman than she thought.
"Good for you, bro," she said, patting his back. "I have to go do something," she added, standing up and walking across the roof to her window. Finnley ducked down and went through the opened glass, feet-first.
When she got inside of her room, which looked like it had been hit with a hurricane, Finnley immediately close the window and shut the curtains. No one will see her. No one.
Finnley took a seat at her desk and opened her blue laptop. While it started up, she stared at a picture she couldn't bear to get rid of – a picture of her, Hailey, Cameron, and Jaime sitting in the representative's chairs in congress. It sat framed next to all the codes and information she kept on her desk and wall.
When her laptop sang it's wake-up song, Finnley was pulled out of her nostalgic trance and into hacking-mode. She did her usual rounds – grades for Nick and the occasional Facebook of an unfortunate bitch who deserved a little random hate-message as her status. But when she got to her family's bank account, her last thing to check, her heart stopped.
They were nearly bankrupt.
"What the hell…" she trailed off in shock.
Finnley even refreshed the page several times before the balance changed. Thank goodness, she thought. False alarm.
But her heart stopped again when she actually looked at how much money they had: one hundred dollars less than seconds before.
Finnley started to panic. How will I go to college? What about my car that Mom and Dad were supposed to get me for my birthday? What about our house?
There has to be a way to save us, she thought.
Then it hit her. She didn't even think of the consequences before she was in another account, transferring hundreds of thousands of dollars into their family's account. She finished in two minutes flat, giving her family nearly a million dollars – the amount they should have had to start with.
She suddenly started to worry. She covered up all of her tracks and cleared her computer's history. She did anything she could think of to protect herself.
If she could have erased her short-term memory, she would have.
Finnley was a criminal.